Re: Intel or Motorola?

A Jones said the following on 31/01/2006 06:06 am: 
On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:04:49 +0000, news wrote:


<snip>

see
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html



While it is a bummer that Apple is moving in that direction, that's
not going to be a major factor in my decision. The decision to go
to Apple from Linux itself already means that, at this stage of my
life, I'm putting my priority on good technology over more
abstract philosophical principles about freedom.


If only TC were abstract and philosophical! It's anything but.

The fact is, I never use pirated software or unlicensed media files
anyway. I seem to be one of the few end users who respect intellectual
property. The link you provided talks a lot about pirated software and
such, and gives the impression that the writer assumes the reader will
frightened by the threat of having his warez detected. I hate to be a
buzz kill, but I look down upon people who use pirated software and
unlicensed files, and it doesn't really bother me if their lives get a
little more difficult. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't mind if they were
all thrown in the same jail cells with the hackers, the virus writers, the
spammers, and other computer criminals.

Yes he talks about pirated software, but in the context of the entire FAQ and his other research, this is not piracy as we know it now. this is about your ability to overcome unreasonable restrictions and charges put on your use of your computer and its software. I appreciate though, that a lot of people won't mind, specially if it's the 'company' (and thus, society at large) who will be footing the bill and paying for all the extra time wasted on registrations every time you want to do something different or on a different machine.

Still, I'm not advocating fighting against this; it is needed by far more powerful entities than you or me, there is no point in banging your head against a brick wall. One of Apple's last G5s would be good enough tech for most things, and put off the time when you'll have to deal with parasitic entites taking over the equipment and software you've paid for. that's what I was thinking of when I suggested the G5 range.

As far as invasions of privacy, yes I'm a little worried, but I'm actually
more worried about hackers. The reality is, my Linux box is probably already an easy target for a good hacker. I used to work in a CS department in a group dedicated to OS research. We had dedicated people maintaining a
network of PCs running various open source unix variants. Even with all of the admin's vigilance and knowledge, our network got hacked and totally
compromised about once every 3 or 4 months (that we knew of). Besides that, I strongly suspect that some of the assholes in the group
used to poke around in other people's home directories. So I'm
more worried about what Joe Hacker is doing with my data than what Apple
would do with it.

Even in bandit country, it is unwise for the people to hand over power to the handsome new general who promises to protect you from the bandits.

None of the Linux distro's I've ever used have made it particularly convenient or safe to keep up with security patches either. Red Hat used
to charge some ridiculous amount of money for a subscription service that
would supposedly give you easy updates. The free version with Fedora is so
prone to serious problems that I avoid it. A lot of the major projects
have their own updaters that require you to give control of your system to an update tool running as root that communicates with a remote
server. And there goes the whole idea of owning your own machine. In
theory, since the source code is available, I could check to make sure
that the updater isn't up to any shenanigans. In reality, checking the
source code and then compiling it, or making sure the updater actually
running was compiled from it, are infeasible. In reality, it's a matter
of trust. Who should we trust more, the evil empire, Apple, the Debian project, the maintainers of XEmacs, ...?

None of the above. This is the Road to Hell. Trusting people you don't know and who don't give a toss about you (beyond ability to pay) is a bad move, except in the theoretical (eg. egyptian Maat) society where laws and ethics make up for the lack of personal knowledge.

I might just keep working and playing with old boxes until they don't work any more or can't connect to anyone, then find something else to do.

Good luck with whatever you choose.

Andy
.